International Space Station (ISS) as a tourist on board of a
Russian crew craft - unfit to fly to space, a Russian official said Monday.

"He is being taken off that flight for medical reasons,"
a spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos)
said referring to Daisuke - Dice-K - Enomoto, 34. "It is definite that he will not fly on Sept. 14," Roskosmos spokesman Igor Panarin
told SPACE.com in a telephone interview.

"Japanese entrepreneur Daisuke Enomoto
has been training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City,
Russia, in preparation for a September 2006 orbital spaceflight," the statement
read. "During a recent evaluation it was determined that Mr. Enomoto has a medical condition that will exclude him
from participating as a crew member of Soyuz TMA-9."

Enomoto was to have become a fourth space
tourist if he had been flown on broad of the Soyuz-TMA craft to the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 14. However, his plans are being to put on
hold for medical reasons which Panarin would not
disclose Monday. Panarin would only say that "no
other reasons, but medical" are behind the decision of the so-called
Inter-Departmental Commission for Determination of Preparedness of the Crew to pull the Japanese
businessman from the planned flight.

Panarin told SPACE.com that the
commission, which will meet either Tuesday or Wednesday, is likely to pick Enomoto's counterpart from the back-up Anousheh Ansari to fly to ISS with U.S. commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin. Ansari
is a U.S. businesswoman and is a space tourist like Enomoto.

Space Adventures did not specify in its statement whether Ansari would step into Enomoto's place for the upcoming launch.

As for Enomoto, he may recover
from whatever health problems he has and fly to space later on, Panarin said.

"From what I know the situation is not hopeless," Panarin said when asked if Enomoto
could recover enough to fly to ISS with some of the subsequent crews.

If picked, Ansari would spend 10
days on board of ISS and then return to Earth with the station's current crew
which consists of Russian commander Pavel Vinogradov and U.S.
flight engineer Jeff
Williams.

Ansari and her family have a track record
in private space ventures.

The family backed the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million suborbital
spaceflight contest for private teams, with a multimillion-dollar contribution
in 2004, according to SPACE.com.

Enomoto and Ansari
have spent the last few weeks conducting final training sessions in Russia's
Star City complex. Ansari said last month that she
was mentally and physically prepared to fulfill her duties as Enomoto's backup, but would have to leave her planned space
projects on Earth if required to do so.

Ansari said Space Adventures, which has
also brokered past ISS-bound space tourist flights for U.S. scientist and
entrepreneur Gregory
Olsen, South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth and U.S. entrepreneur Dennis Tito, knew of her interest
in orbital spaceflight and asked if she was interested in serving as Enomoto's backup.